It's simple really: English grammar can be a very dry subject, but this need not be the case. For a few years now, I have been developing a games-based approach to teaching important grammar concepts. It is amazing how the introduction of dice takes the learning into a new place - the element of chance making it seem less like work and more like play. Because I test my games extensively in the classroom, I get a feel for what works. Dump your boring worksheets and start dicing with grammar.
It's simple really: English grammar can be a very dry subject, but this need not be the case. For a few years now, I have been developing a games-based approach to teaching important grammar concepts. It is amazing how the introduction of dice takes the learning into a new place - the element of chance making it seem less like work and more like play. Because I test my games extensively in the classroom, I get a feel for what works. Dump your boring worksheets and start dicing with grammar.
Quiz, Quiz, Trade is a fun and active way for children to learn facts.
These times table Quiz Quiz Trade cards have red, amber, green and sometimes blue questions. The children can say which colour question they would like, depending on how confident they are feeling.
A two player dice game that really gets children talking about the rules for adding -ing. This resource comes with a peer marking sheet so that children can learn from each other. Depending on your class, you’ll need at least 30 minutes to play this.
I can use a hyphen to combine words and create compound adjectives.
Explanation
Children need to understand how hyphens can be used to avoid ambiguity (e.g. man eating shark versus man-eating shark, or recover versus re-cover). Also, an understanding of hyphens can add descriptive depth to noun phrases (e.g. the creature) when they are used to form compound adjectives (the ferocious-looking creature). In the compound adjective ‘ferocious-looking’, the hyphen shows that the two component words have a combined meaning.
Aim: using the ‘dice guide’, roll to create six compound adjectives with hyphens that you could use before a noun (e.g. muddle-headed monster). Write definitions for your compound adjectives on your ‘game card’. Keep unusual or ridiculous combinations too!
Have fun playing with words!
From Year 2 onwards children are expected to understand and compose statements, commands and questions as part of their understanding of grammar and punctuation.
Bring this dry subject matter to life by playing 'Mission Control'. Why should a fun games-based approach only be used in mathematics?
This resource has everything you need:
full lesson plan with differentiation;
PowerPoint to support direct teaching;
fully resourced game.
Just add 1-6 die and you are ready for blast off. 10...9...8...7...
Fully resourced 3 week unit for this text also available in my store!
I wrote this model text for year 3/4 children learning about the Stone Age (Bronze Age and Iron Age models are also included in your download). Important year 3/4 conjunctions, prepositions and adverbs are shown in red. The model has been written so that the children can easily use it to help them structure their own reports on the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. There is one image and it is from PIXABAY.
I have also included some teacher notes about the text. If you are a talk for writing school, I have included the ‘story map’ for the first 4 paragraphs - that’s the amount we ‘talk’ off-by-heart.
I have included Bronze Age and Iron Age versions of the Stone Age model. This is to show how the model can easily adapted to new subjects, and to give ideas for outcomes that the children could research and write.
Finally, there are two activities related to the Iron Age version of the model that may be handy. One involves adding prepositions to information sentences. The other involves organising information in a sensible way (sub headings, captions etc).
How many times have you taught your class about the rules for setting out direct speech? Worksheets are not the answer!
How about trying a playful approach? Working in pairs children roll dice, create sentences and score them. They have to look closely at punctuation and think carefully about reporting clauses to be successful at the game.
This game can also move more able writers on because players often need to add further chunks (or phrases and clauses) onto the end of the direct speech sentence. If they apply this skill in their writing, it can add depth.
I have also added a more advanced version of the game, teaching children to interrupt direct speech by dropping the reporting clause into the middle of the sentence.
As with all of my resources, everything is included (teacher/child friendly explanation of key concepts, score cards, rules, dice guides) apart from the dice and the paper!
Adverbs are one of the trickier word classes, so let's start off with the basics and learn in a playful way.
From Year 3 onwards, children are expected to understand the term 'adverb' and use adverbs in sentences. From Year 4 onwards, children are expected to be able to open sentences with adverbs.
In this fully resourced lesson (including lots of engaging activities), complete with lesson plan, presentation and a lively dice game, children will learn to understand the term 'adverb' as well as exploring some of the functions of adverbs. They will also have plenty of opportunities to use adverbs in sentences orally - though if desired, they could record their learning as well.
There is also more challenging task for your talented writers and I have included the game cards so that you can edit them to match your class text.
This lesson would also be an ideal revision tool for the Year 6 Grammar Test.
Quiz, Quiz, Trade is a fun and active way for children to learn facts. The cards can be tailored to cover any subject area, topic or learning objective and are particularly useful for introducing a new subject area that your class wouldn't already know lots about. You could include a range of differentiated questions, but I have often found that the children you least expect will learn the more complicated facts after playing this game.
The idea behind Quiz, Quiz, Trade is that it is a fun, non-threatening and exciting game that is inclusive for all and will help all children in your class to acquire knowledge quickly. Really handy when you just need them to have a bit of background knowledge or learn something quickly in order to apply or develop the knowledge in their work. Quiz, Quiz, Trade can be used for any age group (my cards are all aimed at years 4-6) that will be able to read the questions and answers.
I have used Quiz, Quiz, Trade in observations with much success (see instruction page) and consistently use it to introduce new topics in class-the children love it!
Included in the zip folder: detailed lesson plan, presentation, four fantastic personification generators (spooky woods, old buildings - inside and outside, creepy caves and majestic mountains). You will need 1-6 dice to use the personification generators. Try them - the combinations really work!
Everything is Word/PowerPoint so you can edit and adapt as you wish.
This is a carefully planned, fully resourced and differentiated lesson about personification aimed at upper key stage 2 writers.
I used this session to create poetry with personification, but it would work equally well with descriptive writing or story settings.
The lesson is structured as follows:
Warm up
What is figurative language?
What is personification?
Can you personify your noun using one of the prompts on the screen?
Shared writing
2 differentiated dice-based personification generator activities - children use these to create stunning examples of personification about spooky woods (one verse) or spooky buildings (two verse: inside/outside writing) - try it!
Peer assessment
There are two additional personification generators if your class are keen to do more (cave and mountains).
Fully road tested - in one session the whole class had written superb personification poems (example included on the ‘woods generator’), and they really enjoyed the spooky theme. I hope your class have the same success.
THIS IS THE BEST WAY TO MAKE PARAGRAPHING A FUN AND CONCRETE EXPERIENCE. This is a fun and engaging activity (for groups of four) about organisation within a paragraph. Using a non-fiction context (information about mammoths) pupils go to a paragraph party. They have to work out who is hosting the party (the topic sentence), who is the uninvited guest (information that doesn’t belong) and various other activities.
In short, it’s a lively and memorable way of exploring non-fiction paragraphs.
Updated instructions now added Quiz, Quiz, Trade is a fun and active way for children to learn facts. The cards can be tailored to cover any subject area, topic or learning objective and are particularly useful for introducing a new subject area that your class wouldn’t already know lots about. You could include a range of differentiated questions, but I have often found that the children you least expect will learn the more complicated facts after playing this game.
The idea behind Quiz, Quiz, Trade is that it is a fun, non-threatening and exciting game that is inclusive for all and will help all children in your class to acquire knowledge quickly. Really handy when you just need them to have a bit of background knowledge or learn something quickly in order to apply or develop the knowledge in their work. Quiz, Quiz, Trade can be used for any age group (my cards are all aimed at years 4-6) that will be able to read the questions and answers.
I have used Quiz, Quiz, Trade in observations with much success (see instruction page) and consistently use it to introduce new topics in class-the children love it!
Use the presentation to explore ary, ory and ery word endings.
Play the fun two player game with built in self assessment - Word race: ‘ary’, ‘ery’, ‘ory’
Challenge and support activities are included.
Challenge:
Try the ary ory ery riddles included (‘challenge activity’).
Support:
Match the word cards and sentence cards and write the sentences down.
Word and PDF versions of everything included! In this fun ‘fronted adverbials’ game, children are journalists, working for rival newspapers. Bitter rivals! Players want to be first to the big news stories before their rival scoops them. Only the ‘First on the scene’ will get the story in their paper. The first player to finish their newspaper is the winner!
Assessment focus
I can use fronted adverbials to say ‘How?’ ‘When?’ ‘Where?’ events happen
I know that fronted adverbials come ‘first’ in a sentence
Explanation
If you’ve been teaching for as long as I have (don’t ask!), you’ll have heard adverbs referred to as ‘roving reporters’. ‘Roving’ because they have more freedom to move around the sentence than other groups of words and ‘reporters’ because they often tell us more about the action and how/when/where it happens.
• Slowly, he entered the room.
• He slowly entered the room.
• He entered the room slowly.
Fronted adverbials aren’t ‘roving’ because they always open the sentence. You could think of these words and phrases as reporters (journalists), chasing big news stories and wanting to be ‘first on the scene’ to tell us more about the action as it happens. That’s why I created the game ‘First on the scene’ to encourage young writers to open sentences with adverbials.
Fully differentaited dice game! Identify and correct apostrophe catastrophes.
This game is differentiated into three versions to include all learners.
Apostrophes are first introduced to children in Year 2 (UK National Curriculum). By the end of Year 4, children are expected to use apostrophes accurately to show possession, omission and to mark plural possession.
This game provides an opportunity to practise all three types of apostrophe use mentioned above and would also be very useful to revise the use of apostrophes in Years 5 and 6. The 'support' version of the game could be used with younger children as it just focuses on apostrophes of possession and omission.
The game includes instructions on how to play (with ideas about how to finish the game), differentiated versions, and resources to support and challenge pupils. There are also 'time-saver' versions of the game cards that don't need to be cut out!
***I prefer to use the game 'landscape', and I blow the pupil recording sheets up to A3 so that they have lots of space to write. I have added a landscape version of the game.***
There are lots of resources already available for expanded noun phrases, but none that really challenge children to develop their vocabulary and make really adventurous or precise choices.
This dice activity encourages children to try out new word choices from extensive word banks, and it is fully differentiated into three versions. In its simplest form, children add adjectives and pairs of adjectives to noun phrases. In its most challenging form, children may have to add two compound adjectives and a preposition phrase - this can result in some wonderfully descriptive sentences.
It all depends on the roll of a dice. Of course, teachers that love using my games will have guessed that already! Try it with your class and then ask them to apply the skill in their next composition.
Fully editable so that you can easily adapt it to the unit you are working on by changing the single clause sentences that the children will be developing.
*The main version here works well with myth, legend and adventure, but I have added a sci-fi version to show how it can be adapted for use with any fiction.
I couldn't find much out there on KS2 noun phrases. Lots of stuff for KS1, but I feel it still needs pushing in KS2. On top of that, I couldn't find any decent short texts for sci-fi writing...
So here is a very exciting - but also brief - sci-fi text. Children have to expand the noun phrases. There are 6 suggested ways they can expand nouns and a detailed word bank to support them.
The text could also be used as a model for writing - it would be easy to play with it create something entirely new.
Worked for my class.
A fully planned lesson with differentiated rounding activities. Children place numbers on a number line and round to the nearest 10. Very straightforward. They can work with anything from 2 digit numbers up to 6 digit numbers. Differentiated four ways. Simple but effective!
This resource is six activities linked to the text. They are ready for children to pick up and use independently.
Defining and reusing tricky words from the text
Picking out the key features of a fable from the text (and from ‘The Promise’)
Adding fronted adverbials to sentences from the text
Grouping synonyms to create a word bank for fable writing
I can plan a fable of my own
I can write a fable of my own
Learning about 3D shapes? Why not kick off the lesson with a quiz quiz trade to get everyone moving and using mathematical vocabulary. Just print off enough cards for one per child or get adults involved too.